... a deeply imagined early-seventeenth-century world ... We are offered vivid descriptions ... Kehlmann, a confident magician himself, plays his bright pages like cards. But he has a deeper purpose, which is revealed only gradually, as the grand climacteric of his chosen war steadily justifies its presence in the novel ... A remote historical period, rollicking picaresque episodes, tricksters and magic, ancient foggy chronicles—all the dangers of the historical novel are here ... Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive storyteller, who understands that stories originate within communities, and that such stories are convincingly dramatized when the novelist selflessly inhabits his characters’ perspectives ... The book’s narrative is daringly discontinuous ... Despite the grimness of the surroundings and the lancing interventions of history, the novel’s tone remains light, sprightly, enterprising. Kehlmann has an unusual combination of talents and ambitions—he is a playful realist, a rationalist drawn to magical games and tricky performances, a modern who likes to look backward ... is vivified by the remoteness of its setting and the mythical obscurity of its protagonist, which oblige Kehlmann to commit his formidable imaginative resources to wholesale invention, and to surrender himself to the curious world he both inhabits and makes. At once magister and magician, he practices the kind of novelistic modesty that can be found at the heart of classic storytelling.
... it’s possible to read Tyll with pleasure while knowing next to nothing about the history. This is because it first of all succeeds as a rip-roaring yarn ... this book artfully conceals its own sophistication ... It’s only on careful inspection that you see how cunningly each episode fits with the others ... historical fiction, but its strangeness and energy give it the flavour of a speculative or post-apocalyptic novel ... plunges a modern reader into an astonishingly violent and dirty alternative reality ... Kehlmann renders this world with an extraordinarily delicate and vivid touch, fixing on just those details that seem to capture the differences from our own ... a very funny novel, too, with a Monty Pythonesque fascination for absurd hierarchies, court protocol and the status games played by egotistical participants at peace conferences ... In this bleak world, the figure of Tyll himself is a tonic both to the audiences he entertains and to the reader. He stands at an angle to his era: in it, but never fully of it, looking at everything with a beady, mocking eye, like an avatar for a sceptical modern sensibility. And whereas the Tyll of the original German chapbooks is a one-dimensional provocateur, in the novel he becomes a fully realised character whose ability to see through the cant of his era has been bought at terrible personal cost ... The book also stealthily and elegantly feeds you just enough exposition to whet your curiosity about the historical figures and events it depicts ... It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times.
... darkly brilliant ... In Kehlmann’s hands, Tyll, based on the German folk hero better known here as Till Eulenspiegel, also has a compelling personal story, one he alternately reveals in jest and dances away from ... merciless, following its protagonist through a war torn continent terrorized by lawless mercenaries and equally bloodthirsty religious zealots ... Like one of Tyll’s japes, the core story takes some unraveling ... an episodic and nonlinear approach, and Ross Benjamin’s translation gives a clarity to the individual voices that render their stories — tragedies, for the most part — profoundly humane.
In this robust, flavourful translation by Ross Benjamin, Kehlmann often matches the visceral quality of Grass’s prose. He has, though, a genial lightness all his own ... Like a magician plucking an egg from an empty palm, Kehlmann summons comedy, farce, wisecracking badinage, even romance, from this blighted time ... In its droll way, Kehlmann’s portrait of the shape-shifting jester belongs to the German family of the Künstlerroman: the novel of an artist’s growth ... Kehlmann’s own graceful sleight-of-hand makes past and present, myth and history, merge. His time-defying artifice, and artistry, persuades us that 'Nothing passed. Everything was. Everything remained.'
... an impeccable English translation by Ross Benjamin ... a magnificent story of an artist’s transcendence over the petty superstitions, convenient betrayals and widespread brutality of his time ... Tyll’s picaresque tale ranges widely over Europe, but Kehlmann juggles his stories with the dexterity of Ulenspiegel himself ... Even more gripping are scenes with no wink toward the history books ... Kehlmann is a master of economical, devastating description ... Equally chilling are his descriptions of a society in which old kindnesses are forgotten under pressure, where truth matters less than the ability to terrify people into confession, where lies scribbled in Latin become history ... In this exquisitely crafted novel, Kehlmann moves just as nimbly through the grimmest of human experiences. The result is a spellbinding memorial to the nameless souls lost in Europe’s vicious past, whose whispers are best heard in fables.
... a laugh-out-loud-then-weep-into-your-beer comic novel about a war ... you don’t really need to know anything about the Thirty Years’ War, or the eight million dead it left in its wake, or its special significance among the many interminable wars of religion that racked Europe. Still, the more you know, the more ambitious Tyll will prove, the more enormous, the more powerfully condensed ... also a thoroughly contemporary novel. It is artful and ironic and self-conscious. Thank goodness Ross Benjamin ... got the translation gig. He’s a comic virtuoso, aping the clotted complexities of court etiquette, there applying nursery words to convey the narrowness of peasant life, and hitting now and again on rhythms that prove hilarious almost regardless of their content ... you never feel lost. There are clues to how the whole hangs together. One tale throws a telling detail into the air; another catches it neatly, with a wink. Kehlmann juggles his stories as Tyll juggles just about anything you throw at him, usually while he’s balancing on a wire far above the ground, quite often on his head ... operatic in its gestures, and heartbreaking in its absurdity. Kehlmann is at the top of his game.
While Tyll shows impressive imagination, learning and ambition, it is quite a slog—there’s lots of history and not enough story ... Choosing Tyll as the binding element in this sprawling epic leads to a certain narrative awkwardness. While the novel requires him to perform as the charismatic, mercurial figure of legend, Kehlmann also makes efforts to flesh him out as a feeling, thinking, embodied human being. The result is that he dangles in an unsatisfying limbo between mythos and character, never fully convincing as either ... Much of Tyll, however, rumbles along in rather plain, magic realism-tinged prose. The most amusing passages riff on arcane theological, philosophical and scientific intrigues ... These Borgesian tidbits, though, are insufficient nourishment over Tyll’s long march.
Kehlmann puts us deftly inside Tyll’s fretful mind ... Like recent Black Death novels by James Meek and Oisín Fagan, Kehlmann’s portrait of bygone dark times both indulges and disrupts the apocalyptic turn in present-day commentary on current affairs ... Constructed as a string of disconnected, slyly contradictory vignettes, the fable-like narrative darts airily around with vivid detail and neat comic timing, treating the cast, and our attention, as playthings. It’s intricate and cleverly done, but not entirely satisfying: nothing in the book matches the spellbinding opening third, and ultimately it has the air of a slightly self-denying experiment – as if Kehlmann sought to test his skill by doing without the novel’s single most interesting character.
Kehlmann’s emphasis on forms of language goes beyond idle wordplay and informs the novel’s engagement with language as a tool of power ... Kehlmann is guilty of the occasional groan-provoking in-joke ... If there’s a larger problem, it’s that Kehlmann’s nimble way with concepts never pervades the novel’s tone or texture. The set-pieces are solidly done. (There’s a lot of fear and awe from onlookers.) This may be a product of the self-consciousness that he brings to a subject surely better-suited to the impish and on-the-hoof ... one is left with the sense that being mechanically playful is as flat a contradiction as you would expect, and that literature may be on easier terms with its own magical essence when authors are not nudging us persistently to notice it.
Much of the action may be hard for contemporary readers to believe, but Kehlmann does an excellent job of presenting the era’s horrors in a manner that is not sensationalistic, and to his credit manages to infuse some sly humor into events as Tyll’s way of coping ... The nonlinear time line may puzzle, and readers unfamiliar with late 16th-century European politics may find many of the references confusing. In the end, this retelling of a famous German legend will work best for niche readers who appreciate a challenge, portrayals of feudal society reminiscent of Jim Crace’s excellent Harvest, or, Game of Thrones–style gore.
... a rich retelling of the stories that have come down to us from medieval chapbooks and nineteenth-century reconstructions that connected the protagonist to the Reformation ... The later sections of the novel, however, struggle to hold the reader’s interest and after being totally absorbed in the tale of Tyll’s village, the reader is likely to feel lost in the many courtrooms, battlefields and the variety of landscapes that appear one after another ... many names that appear in the later sections of the novel will often send the reader off to look them up in history books and encyclopaedias, sometimes even increasing the confusion further as many of them are very convincing and realistic creations by the author ... Kehlmann introduces an interesting mix of literary devices ... One element that held out much promise in the initial sections was the hint of magic realism ... The character of Tyll Eulenspiegel also does not fail to impress wherever he appears in the book. Despite showing much promise, Kehlmann’s Tyll, nevertheless, has room for improvement. Although the picaresque genre that the novel adopts is all about creating a multiplicity of stories, some coherence and a better interweaving of the tales would have gone a long way in giving the reader some direction ... After many adventures in the novel, whether involving the protagonist or not, when one reaches the last pages, it is only natural to wonder whether the novel has really ended.
Though central to the story, Tyll remains an elusive figure, in a novel that is, as a whole, very slippery in its shifts in time and place ... something of a scenes-from-the-lives novel, the chosen episodes significant, revealing, and richly described, and impressing greatly ... Similarly, in Nele's neatly tied up fate, down to the deathbed scene, Kehlmann beautifully captures the essences of her life ... These negotiations among those in power (and those without so much power, and rather flimsy claims and hopes) are very entertaining, but what Kehlmann really hammers home throughout is the misery of the times and conditions ... in making Tyll such a free spirit, and such a slippery character, and in shifting the perspective so often to that of others, Tyll remains a hazy and in many ways insubstantial character. He usefully plays the fool for many of the other characters -- but Kehlmann seems to want to have it both ways, and that doesn't quite pan out, the title-character remaining just a little too shadowy ... If the whole feels a bit loose, the parts -- almost self-contained chapters (though interconnections also are formed) -- of the novel are generally excellent, as Kehlmann knows how to unspool a story, and manages repeatedly to surprise nicely with how the treats characters and events ... Kehlmann's almost vague presentation of him perhaps appropriate. Kehlmann captures the unsettled times very well -- not least with his on-the-move characters -- and neatly ties history into the story ... If a bit loose in its arrangement, Kehlmann at least also shows a good touch in mostly not trying to force too much into Tyll (despite the temptation of all that happened in those years). It makes for a very good read, which manages not to get mired down in the all the prevailing misery and ugliness (no small accomplishment, in and of itself).
... a wonderful blend of light and dark historical storytelling. Some passages are lyrical and jaunty, not unlike the stage performances of the picaresque hero, Tyll; singer, player, clown, jester, juggler and tightrope walker. Other segments of the book reflect the harsh and brutal reality of the Thirty Years War and the uncertainty of life at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Tyll is a surreal adventure that really captures the times, the shifting political and religious map that tore through the continent, country by country, city by city, village by village. Intelligent and thought provoking, this is a novel that wears its erudition lightly. Tyll is such an enjoyable rambunctious adventure story that it’s easy to get carried away by the spellbinding storytelling, absorbing the deeper meaning more by osmosis than conscious thought ... This novel is often funny, a very enjoyable musing on the nature of history and meaning, myth and memory ... Kehlmann is a creator of powerful darkly disturbing images that will stay with the reader a long time ... This is a tale of harsh times, a compassionate and empathetic portrait of a chancer, a man of his times who seized the nettle. The tale of the girl who rejects his offer is one short passage in the book but it speaks so poignantly of the lot of peasants, the masses at the time, of what might have been by did not come to pass. The multiple voices add balance and perspective to the story as folklore blends with real history. Tyll is superbly translated by Ross Benjamin, the humour and vibrancy of the story sing out from the pages.
Daniel Kehlmann’s narrative gift is so prodigious as to be almost aggravating ... this is one of the most German novels I’ve read in a long time! Tyll, like its eponymous hero, meanders, dwells on detail; it can be repetitious in the incantatory way of tales told aloud, and is in no rush to orient the reader in place and time. But after being dropped into this richly atmospheric world without a compass, in the company of quirkily amusing or repellent yet amusing characters, one surrenders to a pacing out of step with most present-day fiction ... Apart from offering a story well told, Tyll delves into three or four fascinating aspects of those 30 years ... won’t be everyone’s beer. Those hoping for a more suspenseful, less elliptical presentation may wish to wait and check out the version Netflix eventually concocts. But that series, however well done, won’t be this book, and the pleasures of this novel, not least it’s crisp, adroit language, impeccably brought to English by translator Ross Benjamin, can and should be enjoyed — right now.
Each chapter functions as a self-contained short story or novella with recurring themes and characters tying the whole together. Some are more successful than others, and the best are transfixing. German-language novelist Kehlmann, like Tyll, is a trickster and his cheekiness is well served by Ross Benjamin’s fluid, stylish translation. The book is full of red herrings and dead ends, but it rewards close readers with grace notes and unexpected narrative connections. There’s also a dragon ... Unless you’re a student of European history, Tyll is likely to send you back to the annals to look up some of its real-life characters ... entertain[s] us like a jester on a tightrope and remind[s] us of the danger of a fall.
You don’t need any knowledge of the Ulenspiegel legend to appreciate this brilliant, blackly sardonic retelling ... In Mr. Kehlmann’s unforgettable joker we have a picture of humankind in all of its madness and strutting pride
You might not expect a novel about the Thirty Years’ War to be entertaining, much less funny ... And yet, despite its grim subject and despite its jacket-copy endorsement from Michael Haneke, bleakest and most depressing of bleak and depressing German directors, Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel Tyll is a rollick and a delight ... Each chapter presents its own tableau vivant of idiocy, disaster, or hypocrisy ... Anyone looking for their historical fiction to proceed in a straight line like history itself should apply elsewhere ... I will have to trust German critics on the quality of the original publication’s writing, but I can say the English in Ross Benjamin’s translation is fluent and clever. The jesters and traveling players of Tyll sometimes declaim in rhyme and pun; as far as I can tell, Benjamin maintains the sense without losing the wordplay. If there’s something that’s lacking in this translation, it’s something that no translator can supply, namely the historical sense and knowledge that the book’s original German audience will approach the novel with ... Kehlmann himself performs a tightrope act in the book: he walks the line between the invented and the historical, the tragic and the comic, the ridiculous and the sublime. He rarely stumbles, and he dismounts with a flourish. I for one am eagerly awaiting his next performance.
... a rollicking historical picaresque ... Located somewhere between German romanticism and modernism, superstition and science, history and high fantasy, this is a rapturous and adventuresome novel of ideas that, like Tyll’s roaming sideshow, must be experienced to be believed.
Parts of the book could hardly be more relevant to the present ... In exploring the borders between history and myth, Kehlmann sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes ... A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.
